Freedom's Orphans: Contemporary Liberalism and the Fate of American Children

INTRODUCTION
Children depend on adults for many things, and this dependence encompasses more than material needs. Certain intangible goods--education, for example--are just as crucial to their well-being. These observations are hardly provocative, and any sustained commentary on human society that wants to be taken seriously is unlikely to deny this dependence.
In this connection, consider the second of Ralph Waldo Emerson's two epigraphs to his essay "Self-Reliance" (1841):
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
The irony of these lines serves several purposes. It points to the limits of self-reliance, perhaps as a way of tempering the enthusiasm of those readers well disposed to the essay. At the same time, the epigraph forestalls possible criticisms. Without it, some readers might complain that Emerson has forgotten about children and family life, an otherwise startling omission in a disquisition about the individual's relationship to society.
Besides being dependent on adults, children are impressionable. By definition, a child is underdeveloped in several ways: physically, mentally, morally, and emotionally. To say that an adult is mentally, morally, or emotionally underdeveloped often implies that he or she is also impressionable. In adults, such impressionability is considered regrettable (and sometimes a grave misfortune), but with respect to children, it is deemed unexceptional or natural.
These two themes are not unrelated. For good and for bad, a child's impressionability is in some ways linked to his or her dependence on adults.
Nearly two hundred years before Emerson's "Self-Reliance," the Dutch artist Jan Steen (1626-1679) completed a semihumorous painting, The Way You Hear It Is the Way You Sing It. Like many Dutch works of the seventeenth century, it is rich in symbolism, though what the painting says about moral education, human appetites, and the impressionability of the young is clear.
The painting depicts a family of three generations gathered for the festival of Twelfth Night. The grandfather of the family, a rotund man who has been crowned king of the festival, sits at the head of a small table set with holiday fare. Above the grandfather, an uncaged parrot, symbolizing mimicry, rests on its perch. The grandfather's wife sits across from him at the table and reads a nursery rhyme of the same title as the painting. Two younger women, perhaps the couple's daughters, sit between the grandfather and grandmother. The younger woman in the background has a baby in her lap. The younger woman in the foreground, only slightly less corpulent than the grandfather, holds a large goblet, being filled with the same liquid that seemingly caused her drunkenness. A beaker of this liquid stands on the windowsill.
Away from the table, on the right side of the painting, an apparently tipsy man stands near two boys and an adolescent playing the bagpipes. Thought by some scholars to be Steen, the man is showing the older of the two boys how to smoke a long and slender pipe; the younger boy awaits instruction. Behind him, the adolescent with the bagpipes plays a tune. His face appears flush, a detail whose meaning can be appreciated in light of the sexual innuendo associated with the Dutch word for "pipe."1
Despite the passage of many years, Emerson's epigraph and Steen's painting still provide two useful points of departure for discussing the welfare of children in the modern world. Children are dependent, Emerson (indirectly) concedes, and some persons must care for them. Steen's painting reminds us that young persons, more than any others, do not on bread alone subsist.
These two points may be uncontroversial, but controversy can quickly arise when we discuss what the dependence and impressionability of children should mean for public policy. Consider the following accounts, far removed from Steen's playful wit and Emerson's delicate irony.
In the mid-1990s, three horrific crimes in England and Wales were widely believed to have been influenced by the depiction of similar crimes in American movies, then available on videocassette in Great Britain. Benedict Nightingale, chief theater critic for The Times (London), described the crimes and the grounds for his country's anxiety:
In Liverpool . . . two-year-old Jamie Bulger was abducted from a shopping mall . . . by two ten-year-old boys [Robert Thompson and Jon Venables], led to a railroad line, hammered to death with an iron bar, then cut in half by a train. There were suggestions that a horror film about a demonic doll, Child's Play 3, helped inspire the crime.